Close-up of the phrase 'the best is yet to come' in black fine-line script lettering across the inner forearm.

Script quote on inner forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A close-up of a forearm with the words 'the best is yet to come' written in a single line of black cursive script. The linework is thin and even, with the lowercase letters flowing into one another and the ascenders and descenders kept clean. The skin is pale and evenly lit against a soft, neutral background, with the text sitting centrally in the frame.

Lettering Fine line Forearm Script Quote Text Phrase

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lamp's nearly spent and you'll not see the page, so you'll have to listen like a Methodist. Right. The Mary Ellen, out of Hull, nineteen days north of the Azores with a cracked cylinder head and a cook who swore the ship had a passenger in the hold. Nobody ever saw the passenger. Everybody felt him.

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Every dawn the second mate, a Shetland man called Walsh, chalked a line on the slate by the galley door. He had a habit of it. Weather, tides, a bit of verse he'd copied off a tea tin. On the nineteenth morning the slate read, in his careful copperplate, the best is yet to come. The cook laughed so hard he dropped the kettle. The bread had gone green at the edges and the fresh water tasted of rust, and the men agreed it was the cruellest joke ever chalked on a slate.

Old Parr, the engineer, went down that night with a lamp, a spanner and a bottle he didn't share. He swore at that cylinder for five hours. Near four in the morning the engine coughed, caught, and the whole ship shook like a wet dog. Parr came up grey with oil and said the slogan was rubbish, a line for greetings cards, and he'd thank Walsh to stop wasting good chalk.

We raised the Tyne light two days later. Walsh never wiped that slate. It hung in the galley of the ship for years after, or so I'm told, and beneath the line, in Parr's square hand, someone had added the one word that mattered: Mostly. Now hush, and pass me that bottle, for I'm not finished yet.